La Negra Dura

A great title for a book. It's Mexican for a bad-ass black woman. A black woman who

1. Leaves her husband for cheating on her, even though it's 1965 and nobody does that.
2. Joins the foreign service and travels the world.
3. Let's a tribe of nomadic people live in her yard in Niger, as long as they send all their girls to school.
4. Is an alcoholic and dies an early death.

Or maybe a black woman who

1. Goes to an Ivy league school the year after it becomes co-ed.
2. Gets a law degree.
3. Marries a white man when it's still illegal in 15 states.
4. Rises to the top of a cut-throat law firm after the birth of her second child.
5. Becomes a law professor.
6. Quits law to become a world-famous artist.
7. Suffers her whole life from chronic depression.

Or a woman who

1. Is the first in her family to go to college.
2. Joins the local police force when most women still don't work outside the home.
3. Becomes a train engineer in the face of chronic sexual harrassment.
4. Marries a doctor, quits her job, has five kids, and gets left by the doctor for a younger woman.

What about a woman who

1. Overcomes racism and sexism to succeed in high school.
2. Becomes valedictorian of her class.
3. Is told by her parents that she cannot go to college because she is undocumented and was adopted illegally from a foreign country. She can't get a drivers license either, or fly in an airplane, or leave the country.

Or a 24 year old woman who 

1. Works her way into the WNBA as one of the incoming class of professional basketball players.
2. Is convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor because she messed around with a precocious 16 year old girl, and the girl's parents want to prosecute her as revenge. 
3. She gets sentenced to seventeen years in prison.

Damn, you have to be dura to be a woman in this world. It just beats you down.

Welcome Back

Hello readers! Welcome back from your holiday trips, drug or airplane induced as the case may be. I thought I might write some New Year's resolutions so that when I look back at my blog after 2013, I can have concrete, documented reasons to feel ashamed.

1. Do yoga.
I won't deny that I want a yoga butt. Still, there are plenty of other reasons why yoga is the perfect prescription for 2013. It can increase mindfulness and help me live in the moment. I think it also helps with stress, libido, dry cuticles, and vermin infestations.

2. Go cross-country skiing one damn time in my life.
Is that so much to ask?

3. Leave the cave.
Picture me snuggling under the blankets in my nice, King sized bed with fresh sheets, surrounded on three sides by pale blue walls, with some hot chamomile tea, dark chocolate, and a good book. Now imagine me doing this for four straight days, stepping outside of my room only to piss, shit, and raid the fridge. Greasy hair, sweaty pajamas, crumbs all over the bed, and a growing fear of stepping outside, ever again. Yeah, I really need to leave the comfortable, safe, cave-haven I made for myself.

4. Obligatory lose 10 pounds, see friends and family more, volunteer, and stop smoking/drinking/leaving dirty diapers under my neighbor's bed resolution.

Apolonia, the "Fuck You!" Saint

I chose the name Apolonia for myself when I was confirmed in the Catholic church. The exact procedure is unclear to me, but I know that some of the sacraments require names and godparents and some do not. When I lived in Peru, every life event qualified for a godparent: birthdays, dance recitals, anything. This was generally because godparents were expected to donate a little cash for their godchild, so the cost of every celebration and every child was spread through the community. Rich foreign godparents were especially coveted, so it was not uncommon for people to request that perfect strangers be the godparents to their children. However, even in Peru not every event required a new name, naming events are rarer. This, naturally, produces a feeling of weightiness attached to a naming event.

I felt pressured to pick a good name for myself for my confirmation, something that was meaningful to me. Ideally, it would be aspirational, represent a person or an attribute that I wanted to emulate. The religious significance of the confirmation had me trying to be a pious person. I dutifully looked through names of saints for my new moniker. For this task, my catechism teacher loaned me a large, hardcover, illustrated history of the Catholic Saints. I flipped through the pages with diminishing enthusiasm. There are an ungodly number of saints.

Would I choose Teresa of Jesus, who founded a humble religious order against the opposition of the established church? Or Joan of Arc, who led her men into righteous battle? No. I chose instead a minor martyr who was terrorized by the Romans when Christians were hated minorities. She lived in Alexandria, and was done in by mob violence in a riot over something or other. The mob was vicious, and cruelly killed and tortured many Christians. Poor Apolonia had all of her teeth pulled out. Pithily, the Church has made her patron saint of dentists.

The mob wasn't satisfied by torturing her, they also built a bonfire and threatened to burn her if she didn't renounce her faith. She was an older woman, and at this point she had no teeth. She was being restrained, and asked for her restraints to be loosened. Her captors obliged, perhaps shamed because they were hurting a poor old lady. As soon as they eased up on her, she bolted and jumped straight into the fire. When I read this account of her life and martyrdom, I felt a flicker of recognition. It seemed to me that she was flipping her antagonists the bird by jumping on that fire, and that her stubborn recklessness was a good philosophy.

Within the church, I think the reaction to Apolonia and other martyrs who killed themselves to avoid denouncing their faith or to preserve their chastity is ambiguous. After all, suicide is a sin, but clearly, these were brave and pious people. My own feelings about Apolonia are also problematic. Is it good to identify with self destructive behavior, with scorn in the face of public opinion, with an iconoclast? Why couldn't I have felt moved by the saints who day by day showed kindness and devotion, instead of a saint who made one showy move at the end of her life? What did it say about me?

A Motherfucking One-Year-Old

I have a child, aged one. She is a joy. If you see me walking down the street on any given day, I probably look like a fool with a smile on my face for no apparent reason. Except there is a reason, and it is her. Which makes my nightly wish to defenestrate her a bit jarring when it inevitably pops into my mind. That's right, every night I experience a desire to heave my young progeny out of a third story window.

It takes roughly two hours of hard manual labor to get the kid to sleep. She weighs like thirty pounds, and after rocking her for a minute my back and my neck start to tell my brain that it's time to die. It would make me feel better if she would take the hint and put in a little effort to go to sleep, maybe lie down or close her eyes or at least shut up. Instead, she likes to take the opportunity to blow raspberries for five minutes straight, or sing happy birthday to me. It's not my birthday. She doesn't know what a birthday is, really. In fact, I think she might think bedtimes are birthdays.

She makes up for my nightly rage-induced headaches in a lot of ways. For one thing, my one year old has excellent taste in super heroes. Show her a Super Man picture book, and she will pee on it, and you, in disdain. But she spends hours a day babbling about Batman. She makes Batman drawings. They look like blobby scribbles, but the fact that she says "Batman, Batman, Batman" while she is drawing them makes it pretty obvious what she was going for. She was Batman for Halloween, and two or three times a week she likes to put on her Batman costume for a while, preferably while reading Batman Hooked on Phonics books or watching Batman youtube videos.

My one-year-old, cooler than me already.

Self-esteem

Why should I have self-esteem? Should the things I do (or don't do) have any bearing on my self-esteem? What about my professional accomplishments? What about how other people feel about me?

The way I see it, nobody is perfect, and using any of the above criteria for developing self-esteem seems to bump up against this fundamental limitation. In each case, I would develop a standard for good behavior and bad behavior, good achievements, and the failure to achieve. The good behaviors and achievements would supposedly give me self-esteem. But the converse is always that the bad behaviors and the failures would lead to low self-esteem. In the cases where I don't live up to my standards, I would need to have compassion for myself, which really just means lowering my standards, until there are none. Is this what it means to allow myself to be imperfect?

Does allowing myself to be imperfect mean that I no longer have to try to be perfect? I no longer have to strive to be better than I am because striving to be perfect is doomed to fail? How can I not punish myself for failing, while still trying not to fail?

It must be enough that I try to be better every day, even if I fail some or most or all of the time. How exhausting! But how else could it be?

And if one day I forget to try, or am too tired or angry or sad or happy to try to be better? Should that give me lower self-esteem? Or if I stop trying altogether, or if I go completely in the reverse direction and begin to do things that are morally reprehensible, should I have low self-esteem? If I harm someone, or even kill someone, should I have low self-esteem?

Religion offers some neat principles to answer all of these questions, but from pure intuition or logic or reasoning, I don't really see where self-esteem should come from, or whether it needs to have any basis at all.

From a Catholic perspective (because that is all I know) self-esteem should exist simply because we are children of God. That is, by the simple act of being a human and being alive, I deserve to have self-esteem. My worth derives from God. We should also strive to please God, and to be more like him at all times. When we inevitably fail at this pursuit, there is a nifty way to address the guilt and recrimination that result: by confessing and doing penance and trying again. 

This is all very messy and confusing. I'm typing at the speed of thought, but this question plagues me and I would like to revisit it in the future.

Would You Believe It's All True?

Sometimes life is more fantastic than fiction. In a far away land, there once was a singer who was loved by all of his countrymen. His music played constantly on every radio station. The women of the land were enamored of him. The men all wanted to be his best friend, to be as near to him as possible, the better to be like him. In this country, the politicians sought the singer's favor because the singer held the keys to his countrymen's hearts.

It came to pass that the singer's country experienced political upheaval, and there was a regime change. The new government was totalitarian and viciously suppressed any dissenting opinion. They pestered the singer day and night to endorse their regime, but the singer refused. Worse, though in the past he had been apolitical, he began to sing new songs of freedom and hope. In this way, he made himself an enemy of the state.

On the singer's birthday, a day like any other, he went out to run some errands while his wife prepared a meal. Thus, at the height of his popularity, the singer was assassinated. The news traveled instantaneously all across the land. Everybody stopped what they were doing to mourn the singer's death, and to tell their friends, neighbors, and relatives. Spontaneously, people began to walk towards the singer's house, a well known landmark in the capital city. People were amassing in the singer's courtyard even before the police could inform the singer's own household. His body was brought by police escort to his house where his pregnant wife had been waiting for him to return for his noonday meal.

She pushed through the throngs of mourners, desperate to see her husband, and as the realization spread through her body that he was gone, that she was staring at his empty husk, she fell onto the ground and into the throes of labor. So it came to pass that the singer's birth, death, and the birth of his only child occurred on the same day.

Source: "Pop Music" on  Radiolab

I always roll my eyes during movies or books where some exciting event puts a woman into labor, but I guess every melodrama contains a nugget of truth. I have to remember to save this tasty tidbit for a story idea. The child of such a dramatic birth must feel like a child of fate, with some serious expectations on her shoulders.

On the Nature of Art

I rushed down the stairs. I made sure to keep my hands out of my pockets and ready to grab the railing should I loose my balance and fall, a habit of mine ever since I read about a man who died from slipping on the icy step in front of his house on a cold night (his hands were in his pockets to keep them warm and thus could not break his fall). I ruffled through the contents of my pocket for my subway pass and held it up to the card reader. In the distance I heard the rumbling of an approaching train while the card reader emitted an obnoxious honk in rejection of my pass. Try again, it ordered tauntingly. The same grating honk, my only reward for 'trying again.' I moved to the neighboring gate and held my pass up to its respective reader as the train screeched to a stop a tantalizing 10 feet in front of me. Finally, the reader accepted my fare, and I heard a cheerful 'ding' as the gates acquiesced.

I slumped into a seat on the train, a fifty year old man, surrounded by strangers going the same direction. As I felt the tension drain from me, I wondered if owning a car would aggravate my heart condition more than almost missing the train on a daily basis. I tried to meditate on the clack clack of the train moving on its track.

Suddenly a voice came over the sound system and jarred me out of my trance. "CENTral Squaaare," it proclaimed, in the theatrical manner of a ringleader announcing its star attraction, or perhaps a ghost beckoning me into a haunted house. The conductor had purposely deepened his voice, and held out each syllable of the destination. A group of convivial toursists tittered in the corner, and several grizzled veterans of the city rolled their eyes. I found myself smiling, along with many other riders, at the silly and outrageous conductor, who sounded like a child playing with a toy train set rather than a grown man, a member of a union, a professional working for time and a half.

Then I experienced a rare moment, when the traffic signal in my head turns green, and I have a thought that is both true and causes me to see the world in a new way. The conductor of the subway train broke rank and poked a hole in our somber routine. As city dwellers, we willingly fade into the shadows every time we set foot outside into the urban exterior. We put on our poker faces, revealing nothing, and hope we are not disturbed. The conductor's behavior was harmless, but profoundly out of step with convention, which is why it touched a nerve with everyone on the train. Whatever the reaction, not a soul was left unmoved.

In the end, people are social animals. Our deepest desire is to break through the barriers that separate us, to feel a part of a whole. Most people do this on a small scale, with intimate friends, lovers, and family. But when we do it on a grand scale, when we can reach out and communicate with a large group of people, in a way that is interactive, and visceral, we call this art. When we both lose ourselves and recognize ourselves in a piece of writing, music, or performance, or in a painting, both the consumer and the producer of art are really just trying to be close to everybody, all at once.

As I tried to parse my reaction to the conductor's outburst, I decided I appreciated it, for uniting my fellow riders and I in more than the general drift of our locomotion. In this, at least, he was an artist.